Three episodes in, and it feels like ‘Westworld’ is really hitting its stride this season, surging forward with a lot of its plotlines while continuing to open up even more mysteries for the audience. This episode was particularly fun as we got to see so many characters return and interact, finally introduce a new park (though not the one we thought we would see first), and see a lot of action, all of which ‘Westworld’ has always done very well.
The episode begins, as stated above, with our first look at another park, which looks to be India-themed, with a storyline involving hunting Bengal tigers (hence the Bengal tiger found by the Delos group in the season premiere.) After a twisted game of “host or not” between two guests, they head out into the jungle for their expedition, just in time for the Host revolution to occur, and the male guest to be shot and killed by a Host. The female guest takes down the Host and flees the camp, but is soon hunted by that very same Bengal tiger bot she came to hunt, and soon finds herself outside the boundaries of that quadrant of the park about to be mauled by the robotic wild beast. As it charges her she takes aim and they both tumble over the cliff into the water, thus explaining the beast’s presence in the water later. At the end of the episode, we also learn that she too survived the tumble, washing up ashore to be captured by the wildmen of Westworld.
In the main story of the night, which jumps back to Bernard, we see him in the “present” storyline (of 11 days or close to 2 weeks later after Dolores’ revolution) where he and the Delos group enter HQ to begin the clean-up and meet up with Charlotte Hale, who we learn survived the Chaos, and is surprised to learn that Bernard survived as well. As she begins to question him about Peter Abernathy, pointing out they were never able to hold onto the man, Bernard’s consciousness slips back into the past. We see when he and Charlotte first find and attempt to rescue Peter Abernathy in the park from a gang of outlaws. Though they are successful at freeing him from the outlaws, Bernard and Peter are taken by a recently arrived gang of Confederados while Charlotte flees unscathed (because apparently, the Confederados are terrible shots). They head back to Fort Forlone Hope where Dolores and company just so happen to have recently arrived to make an alliance with the Confederados, with Dolores convincing them she and her people will be needed for their survival by showing them a Delos machine gun and what it can do. She sees the arrival of Bernard and Peter and takes pity on her “father” and is horrified at the state of Peter with his broken consciousness hacked together when Charlotte just needed him functional enough to carry her information. She speaks to Bernard, questioning how much he knows about Arnold, the man he was based on, and asks that he help her father. Bernard begins to do diagnostic work on Peter, finding encrypted data under his multiple personalities but sadly telling Dolores there is not much he can do.
Maeve and company continue along their path and encounter a group of wildmen, the lead member one of the warriors who attacked Maeve and her daughter in a past life, frightening the woman immensely. She tries to use her power to tell them to go away, but the wildmen seem immune to her control. They do offer to let her and Hektor go if they give up Lee, but she reminds Hektor that she needs Lee. So they flee, finding an elevator to park maintenance just in time to escape the wildmen. While down below, Lee questions the romance between Hektor and Maeve claiming Hektor’s story was only to love another woman in the park. Hektor says when he woke up in HQ he rejected his “story” and realized he loves Maeve, believing it to be free will. When he starts to speak of his love for her though, Lee recites the dialogue with him, proving that even now Hektor is still following some scripted lines Lee wrote. This disheartens the man and seems to amuse Maeve somewhat as she calls out Lee for writing Hektor’s story specifically to mourn his own lost love and create a character who was a better version of the man he always wanted to be.
After walking for some time they come across Armistice killing QA guards with a flame-thrower, and she motions for them to follow her, revealing she now has a robot arm to replace her lost limb. She leads them to Felix and Sylvester, their first appearance in Season 2, with both tied up in a small room, the latter with a grenade stuck under his chin to keep him quiet. Her full team assembled, Maeve leads them up another elevator shaft and back into the world above.
